Moving in mysterious ways

It's become routine for fundies to assert that extreme weather events (and other natural disasters) are punishments or warnings from God.  This enables them to account for the increase in such events in recent decades while continuing to reject global warming -- God is sending more of them due to the increased normalization of sins like homosexuality and abortion.  (One might wonder why we weren't getting hammered with daily hurricanes back in the days of slavery and the Indian genocide, but reading the Bible shows that God doesn't consider such things sinful.)  Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson notoriously attributed even the 9/11 attack to "the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians".  With hurricane season approaching, we can expect plenty more of this soon.

It seems odd, though, that hurricanes mostly hit the southeastern US, which is the most religious part of the country and the least tolerant of gays and abortion.  Why doesn't God send hurricanes to places like Los Angeles and San Francisco?  It would be a more convincing message, since hurricanes don't naturally occur there.

Veteran arch-wingnut Mark Taylor has come up with an "explanation" which I suspect we'll be hearing a lot more of.  Speaking of a hurricane which is expected to strike Louisiana this weekend, he says:

"That's the first thing that comes to mind," he said, "because when Roe v. Wade comes down, where is [the issue] going to go?  It is going to go to the states.  And you have states out there like Georgia -- and there are a couple of others out there -- that have gone as far as making this stuff illegal for abortion.  You've got to remember, what is abortion?  The sacrificing of kids.  What does that sacrifice do?  Abortion is the food source for Baal; Baal being the strongman over America.  That's what empowers Baal.  You're taking Baal's food source and he's not liking it, so this is retaliation from the enemy that I would say is from that heartbeat bill."

I originally found this quote in this post at Mock Paper Scissors, where a couple of commenters were puzzled that Taylor apparently accepts Baal, a pagan deity, as actually existing and having power.  In fact, many fundies believe that all the deities of non-Christian religions do exist but are actually demons, playing the role of gods as part of their boss Satan's ongoing plan to seduce as many people as possible away from Jesus.  How the ancient Canaanite/Phoenician god Baal attained the position of "strongman over America" is not clear, but maybe he got promoted.  Anyway, apparently these recent anti-abortion laws in the South have been real Baal-busters, and he's riled up about it and about to start smiting the miscreants with hurricanes.

Taylor doesn't explain why God doesn't prevent this.  Perhaps he's too busy appearing on pieces of toast.  But if the hurricane fails to form or does less damage than expected, Taylor will doubtless claim that divine mercy thwarted Baal's efforts.  Until the next hurricane, and the next, and the next.